Where to Find Help When You Need It

Who I Turn To When I Need Help

How I ask past acquaintances for help

This week I’m reaching out to old friends I’ve helped to ask for a favour.

We need more clients for K&J Growth, and we are looking for leads - so I sent a few people in my contacts list this email.

“Hey (first name),

It’s been a while since we last caught up. I just remembered last When we caught up, we did X. How are things going with X now?

I’d love to sync up for a 15-minute call. We’re looking for new clients in these areas - I’ve attached some examples:

1. Lead gen and sales (selling, sales ops and closing) doing average deal size over $10,000 - Here’s a case study (slides 6 - 8). For brevity, it shows an 11.3 x return on every ad dollar spent and a reduction in the cost of their leads by 73%

2. App downloads - We’ve worked with TikTok (case study), PayPal (11th fastest growing app in the U.S.) and a handful of others. We can add up to 100,000 monthly app users if they’ve got the right product and brand

3. High volume user generation - We’ve helped the N.Z. Government add over 47,000+ people to its programs. On top of this, we’ve similarly grown dozens of other companies. They set the price they want to pay for a user, and we find them.

If you know anyone who fits the mould / any tactics for thinking about how we should tackle this? Let me know!

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

P.S. I know everyone is flat out right now, so don’t feel rushed to get back to me on this. If there is anything I can help you with, let me know.”

Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book influence. He calls it the rule of reciprocity. The rule states…we pay back what we receive from others.

I’m not advocating for giving with the expectation your gift will be repaid. Just that if you have helped others in the past, it doesn’t hurt to ask them to return the favour when you’re in need.

We've all got social capital (reciprocity) that we can call on when we need help.

What To Do In Lose-Lose Situations

When I try to buy myself more time.

We all used some version of the dog ate my homework.

And the teachers always knew we were full of sh*t - but they let it slide.

When in a pinch, sometimes the best thing we can do is try and buy ourselves a little time.

I’ve had to make many decisions with no good options in my business journey. Or so I thought.

What was second nature to me when I was a high-school student slipped my mind as a business owner.

In hindsight, in most situations where I’ve felted trapped by poor choices, there’s almost always been an option to buy myself some more time - I wasn’t looking for it, so I didn’t see it.

And the more time you or I can give ourselves, the more likely a better option will pop up.

The dog ate my homework probably isn’t going to cut the mustard in the adult world - but you’d be surprised what will - you’ve probably been the victim of a few before.

“I need to talk to my business partners.”

“I’m waiting to hear from my lawyer.”

“Sorry I missed your email.”

If you’re in a bind, buy yourself some time.

Notes: When faced with bad options, more time will give you a chance to find better ones.

“The best maxim in the history of entrepreneurship is from the founder of Four Seasons, who said that “excellence is the capacity to take pain.” How many people want to achieve greatness? Every single person that has ever lived. No one says, “Oh, I don’t want to do anything. I’m here and I’ll just die.” - Founders Podcast​

The Cost Of Being An Optimist

Why I lean towards pessimism when making business decisions.

Optimists are wrong more often than they're right.

Which is okay when you're Elon Musk drumming up publicity by giving overly optimistic product launch timelines.

But there's a time and a place for such behaviour. And it's not when you're making financial projections—or making decisions dependent on economic outcomes.

Once upon a time, I personally guaranteed a lease for a business, confident that it'd never matter due to the promising projections I'd made for the company.

Within four months of operations, I couldn't afford to pay my lease - which I guaranteed for three years.

I never once considered being unable to pay my lease, let alone the consequences of missing payments on a lease I guaranteed.

The cost of being an optimist isn't just that you'll be wrong more often than you're right; it's that in certain scenarios, the cost of being wrong will be far worse than you can afford to bare.

My credit rating would have been destroyed, and I'd potentially never be able to buy a home with a bank loan. Beyond that breaking, my lease gave my landlord the right to file for liquidation proceedings - meaning I couldn't own a business for at least two years.

I failed here because, in my mind, the best-case scenario was the only scenario. Before I brought the business, I spotted a few marketing gaps, which I thought, once plugged, would generate significant growth for the company.

But the service the business offered kind of sucked, and plugging the marketing gaps just sped up its decline.

I should have considered scenario's where the business doesn't grow or, worse yet, declines (which happened).

Simply put, sometimes it pays to be conservative, especially when you can't afford to be wrong.

Notes: Conservatism = Conservation.

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